Pitchworthy is designed from the ground up to help develop critical soft skills and productivity practices that are correlated with both entrepreneurial and employability success. We call these “Essential Skills” for people, organizations, and economies.

The top 5 essential character traits of successful entrepreneurs:

Honesty (including authenticity in how people view themselves and the world)

Leadership

Zest (including energy, passion, and dynamism)

Fairness

Gratitude

These traits emphasize the critical role of founders in building and leading teams of people, and aligning them around a common purpose. Can you guess what the other traits are in the top 10? (See at the bottom of this page.)

The top 5 skills that companies are seeking in people to hire:

Leadership

Communication

Collaboration

Time Management

Problem-Solving/Autonomous Learning

These traits illustrate the balance between employees as independent, autonomous contributors to the larger organizational efforts, and also as members of a collaborative effort within their team, unit, and the organization as a whole.

And the majority of companies, organizations, investors, and startup accelerators agree that soft skills (essential skills) are more important than hard skills for achieving success. Yet most of our educational efforts neglect them.

Pitchworthy is an Essential skills development platform within a project management and productivity tool. It allows people and teams to develop those skills and strengths through real-world, applied, supported learning.

The Pitchworthy Entrepreneurial Skills Framework

We created the “Pitchworthy Entrepreneurial Skills Framework” to highlight the diverse skills needed by entrepreneurs and startup teams, and to help guide our work at different stages of startup development. Entrepreneurial skills include:

Essential Skills: Founders need at least some level of all of these skills, or they will not take these first early steps into entrepreneurship.

Helpful Skills: These skills are very powerful for an enterprise, but if the founders do not possess these skills (at all, or sufficiently), they can compensate for them through training or hiring.

Startup Skills: These are the core business skills that are needed for all enterprises to grow, all of which can be developed by entrepreneurs through training, or preferably through hiring, during the enterprise development process. (Make sure technical talent is there.)

Sector Skills: In whichever domain the enterprise is working.

Our research shows that most startup development programs focus almost entirely on the Startup Skills, while neglecting most (or all) of the Helpful or Essential Skills.

What Gets Measured, Gets Done

Pitchworthy developed a tool called the MDAQ (the Multi-Disciplinary Assessment Quiz) to help people and programs quantify, monitor, and improve those Essential Skills and habits that dramatically improve both entrepreneurial and employability success.

The MDAQ is built on top of globally validated research by external experts, plus additional elements developed in-house, and assesses three areas:

Essential (soft) skills

Startup skills

Startup status

Making Data Actionable

From the data derived from the MDAQ, we can filter through our Pitchworthy Activities Database of around 800 activities to identify activities that can help teams improve their enterprise or organization, while also improving those Essential Skills areas.

The filtered Activities results are shared with the coaches and mentors, who provide an additional layer of filtering, and then using the Pitchworthy Program Dashboard, they can share that with specific teams or a whole cohort directly through Pitchworthy, enabling teams to view and then directly integrate those activities into their workflow. We call this “technology-empowered coaching, mentoring, and learning”, giving program managers and mentors a powerful toolkit to provide more tailored feedback and suggestions to a larger cohort of teams, and to measure results in a more precise way.

(Use of the MDAQ and Activities Database right now are limited to programs that are actively run in partnership with the Pitchworthy core team (not yet available for “SaaS only” or “training of trainer” options). We will expand availability in the near future.)

In order to provide world-class support to people, teams, and organizations worldwide, the Pitchworthy Educational Pedagogy is built on 4 kinds of engagement:

Self-directed learning: When someone has a question, the first person they should ask is themselves. This also helps build strengths related to mental complexity, and the critical question: “What do I do, when I don’t know what to do?”

Expert-led larger programs: Pitchworthy engages world-class experts to develop and lead training sessions that can involve dozens, or hundreds, or thousands, of learners.

Small-group facilitated learning groups: Enable people to learn and share within a smaller community where everyone gets to know each other, and each other’s projects.

Personalized mentorship and expert feedback: Pitchworthy makes it easier for teams and mentors/experts to connect and have productive discussions, wherever they are in the world. The Pitchworthy mentorship tool, and the platform as a whole, can be used by traditional in-person programs, fully virtual programs, or hybrid online/offline programs.

Join us

Our work in these fields is in active development, and we welcome collaborations and support on these efforts. If you have any questions or feedback, please contact us.

Built on Excellence

Our team has worked at, studied at, and partnered with many global innovation leaders, such as:

Testimonials

Thank you Pitchworthy team, My project went a long way. At the beginning, it was an abstract idea. Now it’s very grounded in the user’s needs and problems, and it is very tangible now.

— Startup Scouts entrepreneur

This program has been a big help for me. Something I never told anyone about is my fear of public speaking [...] I gave feedback and helped a lot of people, and a lot helped me too, and this is amazing, the community is very friendly and helpful. I never thought I could improve that much from an online program.

— Early-stage startup

I didn’t just progress 1% everyday, I probably progressed like 50% everyday. I got better myself as a person in different aspects. My business model also changed a lot to the better. 

— First-time founder

*Curious what other top traits correlate with entrepreneurial success? The Top 5 are at the top of this page. The next ones are:

6. Persistence 7. Hope 8. Teamwork 9. Curiosity 10. Kindness

And interestingly enough, number 11 is “Love”.

How do you think you rank on those Top 10 (or Top 11) traits?

Built on Excellence

Our team has worked at, studied at, and partnered with many global innovation leaders, such as:

Pitchworthy.co is a platform for entrepreneurship support, focusing on productivity tools for teams and organizations. Pitchworthy.org (non-profit) leverages Pitchworthy to support inclusive innovation and impact innovation.